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Introduction to Linux - A Hands on Guide

This guide was created as an overview of the Linux Operating System, geared toward new users as an exploration tour and getting started guide, with exercises at the end of each chapter.
For more advanced trainees it can be a desktop reference, and a collection of the base knowledge needed to proceed with system and network administration. This book contains many real life examples derived from the author's experience as a Linux system and network administrator, trainer and consultant. They hope these examples will help you to get a better understanding of the Linux system and that you feel encouraged to try out things on your own.

"The team is proud to announce the release of Linux Mint 14 Xfce. Xfce is a lightweight desktop environment which aims to be fast and low on system resources, while still being visually appealing and user friendly. This edition features all the improvements from the latest Linux Mint release on top of an Xfce 4.10 desktop. It comes with some of the popular applications found in other Linux Mint editions such as Firefox, Thunderbird, LibreOffice, GIMP, Banshee, Pidgin and XChat, but it also replaces many aspects of the desktop with more lightweight Xfce alternatives: Thunar is the default file browser; Xfce Terminal is the default terminal application; Xfburn is the default CD/DVD burner application; Ristretto is the default image viewer; Blueman is used by default for Bluetooth support."

The Mint Xfce disk boots into a live session unless you press a key for the menu, which gives the alternatives of checking the disk and running the live session in failsafe video mode. If a Windows installation needs to shrunk, use Gparted before running the installer. The latter’s default choice is now ‘erase the whole disk’ — an accident waiting to happen? — and the options to use free space or replace an existing Linux have been removed. If the installer crashes during the slideshow, reboot and run the command ‘sudo apt-get remove ubiquity-slideshow-mint’. Encryption is supported, but not a bootloader password.

The desktop is a standard Xfce, except that the pager is missing as usual in Mint. To start with, things were very slow. This turned out to be due to the update manager, so I stopped it, only to find later that it was set to run every 15 minutes! Software includes Gimp, LibreOffice, Banshee, Totem, Firefox, Pidgin, Thunderbird, and Xchat. Several gave warnings when run from the CLI, although none were critical. Codecs and Flash are installed, although the Flash plugin (hidden in /opt) is the version that won’t run with 32-bit AMD chips. Totem ran very jerkily, using 95% of my CPU, but Banshee worked. Unlike the Mate and Cinnamon versions, this one had the old Ubuntu bug of being unable to use USB speakers.

This is not quite as nice as the standard version of Mint, but still a good choice if you like Xfce. Incidentally, Xfce is not (and was never intended to be) lightweight: it’s just that Gnome and KDE got bloated. This is much the same size as the Mate version, and would run in 512MB.